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Salary: USD 140,000 - 200,000 / annual
Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people to convert PDFs, books, Google Docs, news articles, and websites into audio. The company has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with team members from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, and high-growth startups like Stripe and Vercel.
You will lead Speechify's Android team, which maintains the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also driving team-level improvements. The split is intentional: you'll write and review code, own features end-to-end, and also handle the work that doesn't happen on its own—catching duplicate solutions, standardizing approaches, and ensuring the team's time goes to decisions that matter.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review feedback that helps people learn
- Unblock teammates stuck on problems; notice when someone needs help
- Identify when one person's solution should become the team standard
- Maintain shared code: keep it tested, clear, and consolidated (eliminate duplicate implementations)
- Recognize when the team's processes need to change and drive that change
- Reduce manual work in release processes; automate verification where possible
- Solve systemic problems: when the same issue appears twice, fix the underlying setup
- Run planning focused on decisions, not already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design; bring engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Mentor early-career engineers with learning-focused work and time to grow
The role emphasizes that skepticism from engineers about processes is often specific and worth acting on. You'll work in a flat organization where leadership is earned through technical excellence and consistent delivery.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Rock-solid Kotlin, Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, and JUnit tests
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and how to write tests, including what cannot be covered by them
- Demonstrated ability to introduce something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular half of the job: asking people to change how they work and managing the friction that follows
- A view on which changes need heavy review and which don't, argued from system behavior
- Track record of building things your team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only how you do personally
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve the app and codebase beyond outlined specs
- Excellent communication skills
BONUS: Open source Android contributions; experience with iOS, Web, or NodeJS.
